The Reading Experience

Arthur, Arthur

Partisans of "experimental" fiction (I am one) frequently make unequivocal distinctions between a properly experimental and a "conventional" work: The experimental work is formally or stylistically unlike anything that has come before--satisfying Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new"--while the conventional work merely recapitulates, perhaps with modest variation, an already existing form or style.

If the goal is to identify the truly original, this distinction makes sense, however much it seems to some readers an overly rigid standard or just unnecessary--if a work of literature provides some kind of aesthetic satisfaction (if it's merely "a good read"), what difference does it make if it can be called original or not? In my opinion formal and stylistic innovation is important in maintaining the aesthetic potential of fiction. Without it, fiction becomes just a routinized "entertainment" medium that at best appeals to readers willing to settle for routine entertainment but that at worst itself implicitly denies that fiction has any potential to be "art" except through the skill required to master the moves involved in joining together the familiar elements--plot, character, setting--associated with it as an inherited form. I would not deny that this can be done more or less skillfully (and that the result can be more or less entertaining), but surely it is artistic originality that at the very least introduces a fresh perspective on what might be possible in a particular aesthetic form, and surely this is as true of fiction as of any other of the arts.

Perhaps, however, those of us who would defend experimental fiction against its frequent enough detractors (who usually either do prefer the familiar over the fresh or conveniently judge all literary experiments to be failed experiments) do, wittingly or unwittingly, too quickly discount the value of a work's capacity to "entertain," at least if "entertaining" is defined as that quality of the work that sustains attention, makes the reader feel the reading experience is worth the time spent. I have always thought the greatest experimental fiction precisely manages to both find original means of expression and make that expression entertaining, even traditionally "enjoyable." The fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino, for example, has always seemed to me wildly entertaining, even if it is dedicated first of all to discarding all the conventional ways of providing entertainment through narrative fiction. The same is true of the fiction (and the plays) of Samuel Beckett, if the reader can reconcile the at times farcical premises and occurrences with the bleak view of human existence Beckett presents.

There is also perhaps a middle ground between "experimental" and "conventional" in fiction where writers are able to follow up on (in a sense further experiment with) strategies and techniques first introduced by previous innovative writers, in some cases precisely employing those techniques in a more obvious attempt to turn them to the purposes of familiar literary pleasures. Although some practices that were at one time more daring--fragmented narrative or the move toward "psychological realism" among modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, for example--have inevitably become so assimilated as to no longer seem exceptional, others can still be used to credible effect by skillful writers seeking to avoid the most conventionalized assumptions about writing novels or stories. While the results couldn't be called experimental other than in this second-order sense, such works are certainly more adventurous than the great majority of what gets called literary fiction, and might even help convince some readers that more adventurous approaches to both the writing and reading of fiction could have their merits.

One such work is Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur. Describable as parody or pastiche, or a combination of the two, the novel actually avoids taking on a structure readers immediately recognize as that of a novel, instead assuming the form of an "introduction" to a putatively newly-discovered play by Shakespeare, along with the text of the play. The introduction hardly exhibits the characteristics of an ordinary scholarly introduction, itself proceeding more as the memoir of "Arthur Phillips," in whose possession the play resides, and as such often satirizes the now-ubiquitous memoir form. The structure is highly reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, which Phillips has himself acknowledged, although most of the "story" occurs in the memoir itself rather than in the footnotes to the play (which do, however, add another layer of commentary on both the text and its origins.) Whereas Pale Fire works by forcing the reader to read carefully both the poem Nabokov has written and attributed to "John Shade" and the scholarly apparatus that purports to explicate it in order to extract the "real" story its narrator/editor wants to tell (which turns out to be quite an entertaining if outlandish one), The Tragedy of Arthur puts fewer burdens on the reader (at least explicitly); the fictional memoir, humorously tangential as a critical preface to Shakespeare, offers a narrative complete in itself, while the fabricated play could ostensibly also be read separately.

However lightly Phillips executes the formal manipulation, The Tragedy of Arthur is not an ordinary reading experience. It holds in balance several sources of aesthetic tension the reader must still reckon with, tensions left deliberately unresolved. Besides the obvious unresolved question (unresolved within the fictional framework) of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" is real or fraudulent Shakespeare, we are left to contemplate how much of the story of "Arthur Phillips" is autobiographical and how much invented, which Arthur's life story--pere, fils, or protagonist of the play--is characterized as "tragedy," and whether we are to consider "The Tragedy of Arthur" as "good" Shakespeare, even if it is forged.

It may finally be the aesthetic triumph of this novel that all of these questions remain unanswered, or that they must be answered by individual readers. Although it seems most likely that the con man Arthur Sr. did indeed forge the play, the possibility it is genuine (again, within the fictional framework of the novel) is not foreclosed, as it is not beyond possibility that a "lost" Shakespeare play could one day be found. (At least two plays attributed to Shakespeare are known to be lost.) Moreover, even if it is forged, what does it say about Phillips Sr., something close to a common criminal as portrayed in the novel, that he could nevertheless channel Shakespeare's spirit well enough to produce a plausible simulation? (What does it say about Shakespeare?) (What does it say about Shakespeare that the novelist Arthur Phillips could produce such a simulation? About Arthur Phillips?) That it probably is forged additionally allows us to appreciate Phillips's satire of the "expertise" we assume Shakespeareans possess: their "authentication" of the play is clearly enough part wishful thinking, part craven service to a publisher interested in the project only for the money that might be made.

Phillips invites us to consider his "memoir" authentic as well (much of the information provided seems verifiably true), but ultimately it has to be taken as at least as much a fabrication as "The Tragedy of Arthur," however much Phillips uses real names and seemingly draws on the particulars of his own life and upbringing. Like the play, the introductory memoir has a surface plausibility as "the real thing," but we would be ill-advised to accept it as more than that. It works to reinforce formally what Sam Sacks in his excellent review of the novel called its theme of "the ambiguity of fraud" and in the process reminds us that all memoir is subject to this ambiguity, when it isn't manifestly fraudulent. Fiction, of course, is by definition a "fraud," but it explicitly announces itself as such, and one could say that The Tragedy of Arthur is as much as anything else a playful challenge to our tendencies to read fiction as disguised memoir and to the recent turn to memoir as a more reliable narrative source of literal truth. Readers of fiction will have to be content with the "ambiguity" that accompanies the fraud of fiction.

Such ambiguity (and playfulness) is carried through in the juxtaposition of Arthurs: Arthur the narrator, Arthur his father, Arthur the protagonist of the putative Shakespeare play, and Arthur Phillips, the author of The Tragedy of Arthur. Arthur the younger suffers the tragedy of a broken relationship with his father, Arthur the elder a similar tragedy in his loss of family, but also in the foreshortening of his own life's possibilities through his own mistakes, while King Arthur undergoes the tragedy that often befalls the royal heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies. The "tragedy" of the title perhaps then belongs equally to each, although one might ask whether Arthur Sr.'s forgery might actually represent a final triumph, a successful effort to breathe the same air as his hero Shakespeare, an effort strong enough it has fooled some into regarding it as genuine. The Tragedy of Arthur must represent a triumph for Arthur Phillips as well, a triumph of literary creation that, if it doesn't equal that of Shakespeare, or of Nabokov, is impressive enough and in its ingenuity subtly mocks any sense of "tragedy" involved in the novel's ostensible subject.

Thus finally the question of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" as forged by either "Arthur Phillips" or Arthur Phillips is credible as Shakespeare is mostly beside the point. Certainly it is credible enough to pass as a claimant to authorship by Shakespeare, and that it be good enough to provoke the controversy depicted is as good as it needs to be. Phillips has undeniably immersed himself in Elizabethan language and culture as rendered by Shakespeare, and part of the fun in reading the play is coming upon those kinds of constructions one always finds puzzling in Shakespeare skillfully approximated. ("When they would have your guts to stuff their pudding-bags.") In my view, what Phillips has done most adeptly with the play is to fully integrate it within the concerns and the structure of the novel as a whole, and critics who have emphasized the mere fact of its presence or who suggest it is in itself the focal point of the novel have conveyed a distorted impression of its actual achievement.

Because The Tragedy of Arthur so emphatically foregrounds form, readers are not as likely to appreciate through it what in Phillips's previous novels seemed to me his strongest talent as a novelist, his facility as a prose stylist. This is on display most conspicuously in Prague, his first novel, and The Song Is You, the novel immediately preceding The Tragedy of Arthur. Although both of these novels feature (for American fiction) somewhat unconventional situations--a group of American expatriates in central Europe, an aging director of television commercials becoming obsessed with a young pop singer--neither of them could be said to be plot-driven. Both appeal through fluency of style. This is especially true of The Song is You (although ultimately Prague is probably the better novel because it seems less hermetically caught in the consciousness of a single protagonist), which intrepidly if eloquently articulates the increasingly rejuvenated mental life of its protagonist as he both surveys his life and pursues his new interest in a beguiling singer and in music in general.

The Irish girl performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar's legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player's mistakes, or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. . . .

With The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips shows that as a novelist he has formidable control of both form and language. This was to an extent evident as well in The Egyptologist and in the Jamesian manipulations of point of view in Angelica, but Arthur confirms he is not an ordinary novelist rehearsing the same workshop-imposed conventions. I do not necessarily expect a new Arthur Phillips novel to revitalize the avant-garde, but I have come to expect it will exist outside the mold to which too many novels reflexively conform, formally and stylistically. His novels may lag behind Nabokov or Beckett or Sorrentino in adventurousness, but they do perhaps make some readers aware that more adventurous approaches are possible, and can even bring pleasure.

The Organized Efforts of the Program

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy--and a times great brilliance--by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers" is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the "tremendous energy" and frequent "brilliance" that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that a "vast" number of energetic and brilliant writers have been "students and teachers" in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing "program" to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor to say that, on the whole, the "program era" has produced "a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing" to say that, however "multifaceted" it might be," this body of work is "rich" all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by "the program," even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly "rich." I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced "excellence" of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program--to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before--there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing "improved" American literature as we get--it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in "literary ambitions" this inevitably entailed, and to encourage "habits of self-conscious attention to craft." Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs--the "workshop" method--is shown in particular to have resulted in the "excellence" of the system, although the focus on "craft" has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the "literary fiction" that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman's critique of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise made some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl's book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to "a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems," unavoidably considered and addressed those problems and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement.Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she's not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman's indictment, he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the "complex" problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman's reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren't germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn't much different from many other academic studies of postwar or "contemporary" fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as "systems novel" or "radical innocence" or "dirty realism" as candidates. ("Black humor," "metafiction," "minimalism," and, indeed, "postmodern" began as such terms.) McGurl proposes "program fiction." As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl's analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, "contemporary literature" is by definition undefined. The literary "fields" predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can't help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates--the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author's affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of "program era" as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn't quite fit McGurl's notion of "technomodernism," his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

"Program fiction" becomes in McGurl's analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally "program era" doesn't suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of "the program" and those "aesthetic problems" swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) "Creative writing" did not entirely replace "fiction" and "poetry" as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way--number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of  a program's graduates, etc.--poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to "write what you know" or the impulse to find one's "voice" or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims McGurl makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction,and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete.

A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing--particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the "little" magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history--past, present, and future--needs scrutiny as well.

So Much Noise

Roxanne Gay recently agonized over the profusion of literary magazines available to too few readers:

One of the primary challenges with getting people to buy magazines is that there are too many. It’s not that magazines aren’t doing great work or that editors aren’t marketing their product well or that they haven’t found the right price point or whatever magical solution we’re all desperately searching for. People want to read the exciting work in Magazines A, B, C, D, E, F, and G through Z but it’s not financially feasible to subscribe to all those magazines and there’s so much noise that it’s hard to find a way of saying that Magazine P is worth buying over Magazine V. . . .

The same problem exists with books, something that the closing of Borders only reinforces:

People milled about the store like buzzards feasting on a carrion and hey, I was there too, looking for bargains. . .As I looked around the store, even in it’s diminished capacity,  I thought, “This is too much.” How could anyone possibly know what to read in that store swollen with books, too many of them mediocre? How could any reading experience be meaningful amidst so many choices?

I certainly agree that "too many" of the books available in most bookstores--even the beloved "independent" stores-- are "mediocre," but I have to say I also think too many, probably even a majority, of the fiction published in literary magazines (A-Z) is mediocre as well. If there is a source of the feeling there are too many magazines publishing more fiction than anyone could possibly read, it is here, in the stuffing of literary magazines with stories few will read because they aren't really worth reading, are most likely being published because the authors need the credits to keep their creative writing teaching jobs, just as most of the magazines exist in the first place to bestow such credits.

I realize this is a harsh assessment, but it seems to me that anyone truly interested in addressing the oversupply problem Roxanne Gay has honestly described needs first of all to acknowledge my assessment isn't completely inaccurate. There is sometimes "exciting work" to be found in many literary magazines--and not just the most well-known--but the real problem is being able to keep track of that exciting work in the midst of so much that is just perfunctory. Literary magazines have historically played an important role in maintaining the vitality of American fiction and poetry, and they need to continue playing that role. However, for that to happen their mission must first of all be to provide a place for the publication of potentially significant additions to literature, not of routine, indifferent work by instructors wanting tenure or aspiring "authors" whose fondest wish is to "be published" rather than to write interesting poetry and fiction.

Gay wonders whether the underlying problem is that "everyone wants to be an editor." Starting up a new magazine and publishing worthy writers seems a noble calling, never mind the difficulties of actually getting your magazine into the hands (or on the screens) of actual readers, and so there is a lot of starting-up and not enough following-through.

Another magazine where the editors don’t know how they’re going to fund each print issue? Are these magazines, multiplying exponentially, really going to offer something we’ve never seen before? Is becoming an editor really that important?

I would suggest instead that editors and would-be editors are making a mistake by not including more literary criticism among the contents of their journals. A few magazines run a few book reviews in a given issue, but these reviews tend to be relatively brief, short on analysis and long on boosterism. It is understandable that reviewers in such a context would want to reinforce a sense of literary community, but finally that is precisely the biggest problem: Literary magazines may be the only remaining site of what could be called a common literary culture, and one wants to encourage and cultivate that culture, but not at the expense of a frank estimation of practices and achievements. The current situation, in which academics no longer engage in "mere" evaluation and appraisal, and in which newspaper and magazine reviewing is becoming more and more cursory when it isn't simply disappearing, in my opinion no longer makes it acceptable for literary magazines to blunt a necessary critical edge.

It seems to me that literary culture is just as likely to wither away through the neglect of impartial, substantive criticism as it is through the oversupply (or undersupply) of literary magazines per se. Without it, literary works just get folded into the "entertainment culture," and since poetry and serious fiction cannot hope to compete with most of the other choices offered by this culture, it is permanently marginalized, without even the lingering respect conferred by tradition. Without conscientious criticism, which goes beyond making superficial judgments of value and attempts to explain, describe, interpret, works of literature disappear into the undifferentiated mass at which Roxanne Gay despairs.

Why couldn't literary magazines include such criticism as part of their effort to maintain a literary culture? Surely one or two substantial book reviews and/or an essay on a contemporary writer or work wouldn't deprive many deserving stories or poems of their space. Such criticism might even make that space seem more valuable. Perhaps an especially intrepid editor might invite a critical examination of one or more of the "creative" contributions in the present, or a past, issue. Beyond helping readers make specific decisions about what to read and appropriate discriminations in what they have read, critical contributions like this might help readers understand why what they read is important, why continuing to publish and read literary magazines is important. They might help to reduce the noise.

 

Empathy Will Be Received

To an extent, it's a little surprising that Elisabeth Sheffield's Fort Da (FC2) has not received more attention. It is, after all, in part a fairly sensational story about what we now call a "sexual predator," in this case a reversal of Lolita in which the "offender" is a female scientist who becomes obsessed with an adolescent boy. Although to be sure the story is told (by the woman) in an unorthodox way, the narrative is explicit enough, and the representation of motive and psychology seems true enough, it would seem the novel might have caused a little bit of controversy, although the very fact the narrative is related through unorthodox means that to some extent distance us from the events portrayed and mute the potentially scandalous elements suggests that Sheffield certainly did not seek to court controversy.

What Sheffield seems to be after is a truthful account of the narrator's affliction (if that's what it is) and of her manner of coping with it. The narrator straightforwardly acknowledges her desire for Aslan, the adolescent boy, and painstakingly chronicles the events of their meeting, their eventually consummated relationship, and her final efforts to track him down when she is separated from him. But she is not quite able to tell us this story from a conventional first-person point of view, as if she can't finally bring herself to associate these events and her part in them with the "normal" self she still wants to preserve, as if she just can't acknowledge her own agency. Thus she adopts a cumbersomely "scientific" style emphasizing passive voice constructions. Addressing her "report" to her high school English teacher, Mrs, Wall, the narrator affirms 

A true story that will faithfully present yours truly, without distortion or bias. To this end, a detached style has been adopted, one that will hopefully facilitate accurate reportage. The intent of this style is to step outside Rosemarie Ramee in order to more accurately observe her (and not, Strunk and White forbid, to annoy you with passive verb forms, which it is well remembered were a source of contention in high school). Yes, and maybe if the observations are presented with great care, with the greatest possible degree of honesty and precision, in the end empathy will be received.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether to send RR (as she frequently hereafter identifies herself) "empathy," but her tortured attempts to remain objective, attempts she maintains throughout the narrative with gradually diminishing success, are really both the aesthetic and the emotional focus of the novel.

Aesthetically the style seems an apt analogue of the narrator's state of mind--she can tell the story, but only if she is in a sense able to withdraw her own participation and attempt to view the events with a kind of clinical detachment. Paradoxically, this forced detachment only makes the reader more aware of RR's obsession in the effort to cloak it, and her emotional turmoil becomes only more visible. This does have a discomfiting effect on the reader: there is a fascination to witnessing the machinations to which RR is driven in order to tell the tale, while we also recognize her strategy is in effect an attempt to minimize her offense. At the same time, it is not at all clear that Aslan resists RRs advances, or that he has been harmed by them, although of course the long-term harm cannot be predicted and we cannot finally trust that RR's account is anything but self-serving. She indicates that she is addressing her "confession" to Mrs. Wall because of the latter's reputation for leading an unconventional lifestyle, suggesting she does hope her audience might extend her some sympathy.

If Fort Da could be said to be "experimental" (FC2 is one of the most prominent publishers of experimental fiction), it would have to be in this tonal discontinuity--how far can the reader extend his/her sympathy to such a character presenting herself in such a narrative voice relating a story about what today approaches being as taboo a subject as we have? While the "report" form is interesting enough, it is finally just another variation on the epistolary or diary forms first explored in novels like Pamela or Robinson Crusoe as the immediate context and justification for first-person narrative. The narrative itself is essentially linear, and though the narrator's language occasionally makes it necessary for the reader to check his/her bearings, it unfolds interrupted only by the by now rather familiar use of footnotes (although given the text's formal status as scientific "report," the footnotes don't seem out of place).

If RR, like Humbert Humbert, believes her desire for Aslan, like Humbert's for his "nymphet," is a genuine expression of love, she seems less comfortable than HH with this form of love. Although both Fort Da and Lolita could both be said to be comic novels, the comedy of Lolita is darker,arising from the audacity of HH's behavior. The humor of Fort Da arises from RR's own confusions and limited self-knowledge. This makes Fort Da a consistently compelling read--to call it entertaining would seem impertinent--but whether it has something to "say" about, for example, the nature of female desire vs male desire, or about the origins of sexual behavior in psychological trauma (RR herself appears to believe she may be reacting to the early death of her brother) is perhaps for the reader to determine, depending on whether one considers it important that a novel treading on sensitive ground should redeem itself by making a "serious" point about the subject. In my opinion, the greatness of Lolita consists, in part, in its refusal to countenance communicating such a point. By raising "issues" related to pedophilia, Fort Da suggests it wants to address those issues and thus doesn't really show quite the aesthetic courage we find in Nabokov's novel.

 

On Gass

Big Other just posted a "birthday" tribute to William Gass that included an essay by me on Gass the critic. I am reposting that piece here.

Looked at Importantly

William Gass has often been praised as an essayist (perhaps more often than as a fiction writer), but for the most part Gass's essays are more appropriately regarded as literary criticism. As a critic, however, Gass is generally not concerned with making and justifying judgments about the superior and inferior in works of literature (although judgment is always implicit) but with carefully, and, in his singular, luminous style, insightfully explicating those features of the texts and authors he admires that will help other readers share his admiration. At other times his essays are essentially exercises in aesthetics, although the aesthetic explorations are always grounded in specific practices or specific writers. Few literary critics are able to combine deep erudition, critical discernment, and a keen aesthetic sensibility as does Gass, and few offer readers such an opportunity to enlarge their own understanding of and sensitivity to expressions of literary art.

To a degree, Gass's criticism seems an extension of his work as a fiction writer, a critical elaboration of the assumptions underlying it and the methods animating it. But Gass's critical impulses are too generous and his focus too thoroughly on the dynamics of literary creation in general for his essays to be taken as a collective apology for his own style-centered, formally audacious fiction--although certainly it does provide critical support for that sort of aesthetically challenging writing, both in fiction and in poetry. Moreover, it is also the case that in Gass's reading, "aesthetically challenging" is more or less identical with the "aesthetic" per se, so that in describing and delighting in the writers who are the subjects of many of the essays, and in contemplating the devices and strategies available to the literary artist, Gass has been engaged in a lifelong project of alerting us to the presence of aesthetic beauty, however "difficult" or unconventional. He is one of those critics, in fact, who has endeavored to keep the very notion of aesthetic beauty alive at a time when it is often viewed with skepticism as "snobbery" or "elitism."

 Gass is not a snob, although he may be an elitist, but only in the sense, as he puts it in "The Test of Time," that he belongs to the "unorganized few. . .who sincerely love the arts." He--and those of us who would like to be there with him--does not declare allegiance to this group because the arts make us better people or superior people or more refined people but because what they provide is good in itself: "There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished." If great works of art and literature "teach" us anything, they teach us "immersion." For Gass, "they teach me that the trivial is as important as the important when looked at importantly."

"The arts" in their individual forms thus are worthy of attention when they can be "looked at importantly" through an immersion in their well-wrought particulars. In "The Test of Time," Gass focuses on two writers, seemingly very different kinds of writers, but who both nevertheless enlarge our perceptions through their renderings with words. In Walden, Thoreau perpetually brings the pond and his experiences there to life:

. . .we, as readers, are not brought to Walden Pond in some poetic time machine. We experience Walden as it passed through Thoreau's head, his whole heart there for us to pass through, too, his wide bright eyes the better to see with, the patient putting together of his prose to appreciate. Of the pond, the trees, the pain, the poet may retain--the poet may retain-through the indelibilities of his medium--moments which, in reality, went as swiftly as a whistle away; but he will also give them what was never there in the first place: much afterthought, correction, suggestion, verbal movement, emotion, meaning, music. . . .

Hopkins would seem to be the more obviously suited to Gass's aesthetic ideal rooted in detail and sensuous sound, and indeed he is valued for these qualities, even as they failed to satisfy Hopkins himself: In poetically brooding over whether there is a way "to keep back beauty. . .from vanishing away," Hopkins, writes Gass, "said it was 'yonder," in effect, up high in the air, as 'high as that,' when all the while he knew where it was: it was there under his forming fingers; it was in his writing, where the real god, the god he could not avow--dared not worship--worked, wrote, writing his rhetorical regrets, putting his question so perfectly the proof was in the putting." In Hopkins's poetry

They, those things, the terrible sonnets, every one, were composed, brought by Hopkins into being, not when he was down in the dumps, not while he was Hopkins, but when he was a Poet, truly on top of the world, the muse his mother; and the poems supplant their cause, are sturdier than trees, and will strip the teeth of any saw that tries to down them.

Both Thoreau and Hopkins in their own ways contest the passing of time by summoning, through the strength of their writing, a kind of eternal present,  invoking the "rule that reads: never enter time, and you will never be required to exit." Gass assures us that

It was lovely to be on Walden Pond at midnight, fluting the fish, but lovelier and more lasting in the verbal than in the fishing lines. It is painful to lose faith even for a moment or see a row of crudely hewn trunks where your favorite rustic scene once was, but mutilation's sorrow is inspiring in the reading, although we realize the poem does not soften the blows felt by the trees.

"The Test of Time," first given as a Woodrow Wilson Lecture, is perhaps a kind of summary statement of Gass's aesthetic philosophy, but it is very much the philosophy that informs Gass's criticism taken as a whole. He is among those few critics who have persisted in defending the aesthetic integrity of literature in an era when literary criticism has increasingly come to regard the aesthetic as an embarrassing frill or an outright impediment to the enlistment of literature in various ideological agendas or in a program of social or moral improvement. Although Gass is a very different kind of critic than Harold Bloom, who is more interested in the psychoanalytic origins of works of literature than in their immediate aesthetic effects, Gass nevertheless shares with Bloom, if not a belief in "literature as a way of life," as Bloom puts it in his most recent book, then certainly a commitment to it as a supreme human achievement and experience. And while Gass perhaps does not quite pursue "an erotics of art," as Susan Sontag once called for, his appreciation of both prose and poetry usually emphasizes the pleasure of attentive reading receptive to the sensual qualities of language and the dynamism of the imagination at its most engaged.

Perhaps Gass occupies as a critic a space somewhere between the aesthetic purity of Sontag's notion and the explorations in poetic genealogy performed by Bloom. He doesn't assume that works of literary art will be harmed by efforts to "interpret," as long as such interpretation does justice to the aesthetic integrity of literary art, but his own efforts are focused more on the tangible properties of texts than are Bloom's considerations of the deeper sources of literary creation.

Although Gass's essays are ultimately too voluminous, varied, and too occupied with identifying the value of other works and writers to be regarded as a critical justification of his own fiction, they nevertheless do help us to gain perspective on Gass's fiction, in which he too asks readers to "immerse" themselves in description and detail as revealed through the rhythms of his prose and the vigor of his language. Combining an intensity of style and a preoccupation with form, his fiction always impresses on the reader's attention its arrangements and figurations of language, as Gass's own effort to refuse to "enter Time." In this way the essays perhaps form a mutually reinforcing complement to the fiction, the one adeptly practicing what the others eloquently preach